In the wake of Gene Hackman's death at the age of 95, revisit this 2009 tribute from former film editor Andrew Collins, after the actor's retirement.
This article was originally published in RT in June 2009. Add The Royal Tenenbaums to your watchlist. As a teenager, I designated Gene Hackman my favourite actor, in the same way that you might elevate a footballer or a pop star. I had always been movie mad and Hackman appealed to me at first sight, with his tough, marine’s build and no-nonsense demeanour, always offset with a certain twinkle in those squinty eyes. Long, long before the internet, I had to seek out information on him from magazines and books. Once home video arrived, I filled in the gaps in his CV with gusto, renting a lot of substandard fare — the Foreign Legion potboiler March or Die and western Bite the Bullet were lowlights — but as long as Hackman was in it, I’d see it through to the end. I vividly remember celebrating his 51st birthday on 30 January 1981 (I think this was a solitary affair). He seemed old then, but little did I know that he would enter a genuine renaissance in his 60s, with Unforgiven, Crimson Tide and Twilight. In The Royal Tenenbaums, Hackman gave a career-best performance, aged 70, and my unconditional teenage devotion was paid back in spades. In this whimsical, New York-set family drama from writer/director Wes Anderson, he plays the titular roguish patriarch, estranged from his brood of unhappy child prodigies and keen to build bridges with them and his wife, Anjelica Huston, before he dies of cancer — although his illness is an invention manufactured to gain sympathy. His children are played by Ben Stiller (a property speculating genius), Gwyneth Paltrow (a tortured writer married to remote psychologist Bill Murray) and Luke Wilson (a lovesick tennis champion). They live in the family’s big house, essentially in a world of their own — the television series Arrested Development always reminds me of the Tenenbaums. As with all of Anderson’s work, there is an unreal, nursery rhyme quality to the story (Alec Baldwin narrates from a book), and always a danger that connection with the eccentric characters will be blocked by irony. Ultimately, it’s a warm and tender film, thanks in part to Hackman’s full-bodied turn. He retired from acting last year, aged 78, but he’s still my favourite.
Radio Times' film editor Andrew Collins lists his favourite leaders of the silver screen.
The term Independence Day may conjure up images of Roland Emmerich's iconic destruction of the White House in the 1996 film for many, but for those in the States, it also means a day of fireworks, fairs and family celebrations. However, both not only share a sense of spectacle, but an inextricable link to presidents, with Bill Pullman's Thomas J Whitmore delivering one of the greatest speeches in movie history during the landmark disaster movie. So as the 4th July holiday rolls around once again, we're celebrating the very best movie presidents to ever grace the silver screen, as chosen by Radio Times film editor Andrew Collins. They range from subdued statesmen to full-on action heroes - though are perhaps not as far-fetched as some real-life POTUSes - here are the 11 best fictional presidents from the movies, in the order in which we first saw them in the cinema. For the latest news and expert tips on getting the best deals this year, take a look at our Black Friday 2021 and Cyber Monday 2021 guides. 1. President Merkin Muffley Peter Sellers in Dr Strangelove... (1963) Every world leader’s worst nightmare, an accidental nuclear endgame with Russia, drives Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy, in which Sellers plays blandly smooth Muffley, negotiating by phone with the Soviet premier from the Pentagon bunker, as if dividing the bill at the golf club. Sellers based him on Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, UN Ambassador during the very real Cuban missile crisis. And it’s Muffley who delivers the explosive line, “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!” 2. The President (unnamed) EG Marshall in Superman II (1980) View oEmbed on the source website The first Superman sequel involves three Kryptonian criminals in black, Aladdin-style attire – led by General Zod (Terence Stamp) – unexpectedly freed from the Phantom Zone by an H-bomb exploding in space. Bulletproof, they storm the White House and demand Earth’s surrender. A decoy president prepares to “kneel before Zod”, until the real one (Marshall) makes himself known: “What I do now, I do for the sake of the people of the world.” A selflessly noble display, it is spoilt only by an obvious wig. 3. President Bill Mitchell/Dave Kovic Kevin Kline in Dave (1993) View oEmbed on the source website In this much-loved early-Clinton-effect comedy, employment agent Dave Kovic (Kline) acts as a lookalike for secretly philandering President Mitchell (also Kline). Recruited to the post to cover for POTUS falling into a coma, Dave goes on to blackmail the administration in order to remain in office and, despite his lack of experience, fix America: “I’m going to make it the responsibility of this government to find a job for every American who wants one.” He’ll have to go. 4. President Andrew Shepherd Michael Douglas in The American President (1995) A West Wing romance in which Michael Douglas’s widower Democrat faces re-election with a 63 per cent approval rating (not hindered by the sympathy generated by his wife dying of cancer). Things get complicated when he falls for Annette Bening’s eco-lobbyist. Martin Sheen plays the Chief of Staff. He must have thought: nice set, I’ll take it, and sure enough he moved behind the desk four years later when it was re-used for The West Wing. 5. President James Dale/President Taffy Dale Jack Nicholson and Natalie Portman in Mars Attacks! (1996) View oEmbed on the source website Nicholson delivers a show-stopping speech of statesmanlike unity after a bubble-gum-cardstyled alien invasion in Tim Burton’s wacko fantasy (“Isn’t the universe big enough for both of us?”). The bug-eyed Martian leader, seemingly moved, shakes Dale’s hand… then kills him. This implicitly makes Natalie Portman’s first daughter, Taffy, the first female US president, a rarity in this frustratingly male list. 6. President Thomas J Whitmore Bill Pullman in Independence Day (1996) View oEmbed on the source website Pullman’s interplanetary war president is also an ex-Gulf War pilot who delivers unifying rhetoric on 4 July in this apocalyptic UN-flagwaver. The self-appointed President of the Entire Planet promises “we will not go quietly into the night”. Air is punched from all corners of the globe. We should also salute successor President Elizabeth Lanford (Sela Ward) in 2016’s Independence Day: Resurgence. 7. President James Marshall Harrison Ford in Air Force One (1997) A definitive “action president”, Ford’s Marshall defies Air Force One’s hijacking (led by Gary Oldman, now the definitive British statesman) by faking a mid-air escape and hiding out in the hold. A Vietnam vet and former airman – aren’t they all? – he leads the covert fightback. No spoilers, but President Ford does say this to an unfortunate interloper: “Get off my plane!” 8. President Tom Beck Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact (1998) The first Black president in a major Hollywood movie had to be Morgan Freeman, but even he couldn’t sweeten the announcement (“It’s a bit complicated”) that a seven-mile-wide comet weighing 500 billion tons is headed for Earth: he freezes all wages and prices to prevent profiteering while we fix this. Hooray! His next address is less practical: that God hears all prayers. 9. President (unnamed) Billy Bob Thornton in Love Actually (2003) View oEmbed on the source website During the George W Bush administration, Richard Curtis played out the liberal fantasy in his Christmas selection-box, with Hugh Grant’s PM offended on behalf of Number Ten junior Natalie (Martine McCutcheon) when Billy Bob’s Texan oaf makes inappropriate comments about her (imagine that!). Hugh rejects the louche president’s policies, announcing, “This has become a bad relationship… a friend who bullies us is no longer a friend.” 10. President Schwarzenegger Voiced by Harry Shearer in The Simpsons Movie (2007) View oEmbed on the source website A bored President Arnie is given five blind options by the Head of the EPA (Albert Brooks), who convinces him that “knowing things is overrated”. “OK, I pick three!” says Arnie. “Try again… go higher.” “Five?” “Too high.” “Three?” “You already said three.” “Six?” “There is no six.” “Two?” “Double it!” “Four!” “As you wish, sir.” Genius. 11. President Benjamin Asher Aaron Eckhart in Olympus Has Fallen/ London Has Fallen (2013/16) View oEmbed on the source website Asher is surely the unluckiest president in history, having endured a North Korean terrorist attack on the White House, led by disloyal members of his own security detail, and, three years later, a mass assassination of world leaders and bombing of landmarks at a state funeral in London. On both occasions, he has troubled bodyguard Gerard Butler to sneak him out of danger. If you're looking for more to watch, check out our TV Guide and visit our Movies hub for more news and features.
Children's Film Foundation Bumper Box Vol 2 review - "A valuable treasure trove of innocence"
An assortment of children's classics are now available to share with the next generation
It’s understandable that a wistful air of nostalgia might have taken hold during the escalating Coronavirus crisis – to a Prelapsarian time when things were simpler, events less instantly global and the stakes much lower. If you, too, hanker for the past, I have the answer – the Children’s Film Foundation Bumper Box Vol. 2, a physical product (remember those?) and three-disc set from the BFI that collects films made, on location, initially in black-and-white, and laser-aimed at the young. Mention of the CFF – founded in 1951 as a non-profit and subsidised by a levy on UK box office receipts – will get the nostalgia glands working overtime for Generation X-ers like myself, born into a less tricky world (certainly for kids) before computers, interconnectivity and selfies. Our parents had no choice but to let us run free, having first warned us not to fly kits near electricity pylons. Saturday Morning Picture shows started up here after the war, with local cinemas showing imported American serials, Daffy Duck cartoons and something daft starring Will Hay. This is where the CFF showcased its wholesome adventures, where the baddie was always a grown-up and justice was served. My memory of ABC Minors, as the cinema chain christened its junior patrons, was one of happy chaos. It’s only now that former beneficiaries of subsidized cinema for kids realise how lucky we were. As the new CFF set confirms, there’s joy in these hour-long films, the best of which were produced in the 60s and 70s when bombsites were still seen in rebuilt towns, and dens were vital for the self-respecting gang. (There were no postcode skirmishes in those days.) Many future TV stars earned their spurs in films like 1963’s Seventy Deadly Pills – a Bash Street-style caper in which drugs are mistaken for Smarties – with future Railway Children and Man About the House star Sally Thomsett and not-yet-Alf-Garnett Warren Mitchell. Other CFF graduates included Denis Waterman, with the likes of Dad’s Army’s Arnold Ridley, Ronnie Barker and Steptoe’s Wilfrid Bramble popping up in Vol. 2 too. The full-colour, flared-trouser Sky Pirates is a particular favourite of the box set’s curator Vic Pratt, who tells me he particularly likes its “floppy fringes, playing in the woods, fizzy pop and Airfix model kits.” More seriously, he describes the set as “a fascinating cultural record of everyday British society and changing ideas of childhood.” A valuable treasure trove of innocence, it’s certainly one you could watch with your kids or grandchildren – each film is rated “U”. The Children's Film Foundation Bumper Box Vol 2 is available from Amazon
Andrew Collins on working with Clive James: "To collaborate with him was like winning a competition"
The Radio Times Film Editor remembers the disarmingly charming broadcaster
In 1679, the last Dodo was killed in Mauritius by British sailors. A Navy spokesman said, “It’s regrettable, but these lads have got to let off steam when they go into town at the weekend and believe me, some of these birds are no angels, you know.” Is that funny? I hope so. It was one of pages and pages of history-themed gags that erstwhile Radio Times contributor Stuart Maconie and I churned out for Clive James, whose loss will be deeply felt by those who knew him and those who felt they knew him from his amiably well-read presence on ITV, as well as eruditely funny memoirs and, lately, reviews of box sets. Clive James dies aged 80 Stuart and I were known as “the boys” around the offices of Clive’s production company Watchmaker, hired to write the bulk of the great man’s gags on a three-hour satirical review of the last thousand years for New Year’s Eve 1999. A polymath who was at the time learning Japanese so that he could fully appreciate Japanese poetry, and who considered the tango a matter of life and death, he was convinced by his business partner Richard and producer Elaine that even he couldn’t possibly write a three-hour show on his own. He was magnanimous enough to laugh at the jokes of two ex-music-press hacks who fancied themselves as comedy writers. When he laughed his eyes disappeared even further back into his famous head. It was disarming to see him ambling around the office, smaller and craggier than TV portrayed him, open-necked, usually in shirtsleeves, sometimes in what can only be described as a gardening jumper. We loved Clive James. To work with him – to collaborate, breathe the same showbiz air – was like winning a competition. When we first met him, he leaned in, proffered his hand, turned on that Clive James twinkle, and said, in fluent showbiz, "Thank you for being you." "OK," he would say. "Let’s see what the next batch of archive throws up. I’m going to take a break. Boys, do you want to come to my office in an hour and we’ll work on the latest version together?" (I was 34, Stuart 39). We produced a monster 172-page yellow shooting script, and took it on the chin that part of our job was to gently wake Clive up form an afternoon power nap in his office, sweetly personalised with photos cut from magazines blu-tacked to the wall around his camp bed, many featuring vintage sex symbols like Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida. He usually had half a cheroot in his mouth. When the production was finally shot and edited, Stuart and I thanked Clive for being him.
The Great Hack review: a terrifying exposé of information mining
In an era when data is king, this documentary will make you think twice about clicking away your personal details
The Great Hack is a terrifying documentary about the new threat of information mining. It leads with the fact that data is now the world’s most valuable commodity – bigger than oil – in a new era of digital "disruption" and data misuse. This caffeinated crusade starts with an animated vision of zillions of online posts fizzing upwards from our screens, before settling into more familiar, back-of-a-cab campaigning mode. New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day Top Netflix TV series Top 50 Netflix movies More Netflix news and recommendations <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2017/12/TheCrown_210_Unit_00197_R-a6b2b25.jpg" width="6000" height="4000" alt="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" title="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" /> Among the featured subjects is approachable but obsessive New York design school professor David Carroll, a man on a quest to acquire his own data. His journey takes him to London and Cambridge Analytica – the consultancy closed down in 2018 after a scandal involving unsuspecting Facebook users having their data harvested and then used for political gain. This fastidiously partisan account, directed by Oscar-nominated Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim (The Square), relies heavily on us-versus-them testimony and conjures its own version of project fear. It falters only in terms of the sketchiness of its star whistleblower, former Cambridge Analytica business development director Brittany Kaiser, a social media-savvy human rights lobbyist turned Republican jet-setter whose inside info helps lay the insidious system bare. The Great Hack has a limited release in cinemas and is available on Netflix View oEmbed on the source website
The Cure: Anniversary 1978-2018 Live in Hyde Park London – review
Hot hot hot on the heels of their Glastonbury headlining set, a chance to relive the Cure's 40th birthday celebration on the big screen
Having been formed by suburban teen punk Robert Smith in Crawley, West Sussex, in 1978, prevailing goth-rock legends the Cure marked their 40th anniversary with a show in London's Hyde Park. Did you spot the Doctor Who Easter egg on stage with the Cure at Glastonbury? This pristine, few-frills widescreen account by the group’s loyal chronicler and promo director Tim Pope captures them in fine musical form and bathed in caramel sunlight. The daytime start is somewhat at odds with the Cure’s dark, growling brand of whistleable existential doubt, although you’re never far away from an upbeat hit like Friday I’m in Love, Close to Me or Boys Don’t Cry between the powerfully morose, synth-driven workouts that typify their back catalogue. View oEmbed on the source website Delight darts across the faces of the band members – crow-like bassist Simon Gallup, raffish keyboardist Roger O’Donnell, hard-working drummer Jason Cooper and guitarist Reeves Gabrels, the former Bowie sideman who replaced Porl "Pearl" Thompson in 2012 – but Smith remains the focus, comfortably tubby and grey of thatch, but oddly mesmeric in his self-hugging awkwardness. The biggest movie releases of 2019 Playing a longer set than their subsequent two-hour 2019 Glastonbury headlining slot, this surely puts the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame-inducted Cure in that same legendary bracket as a twilight-years Rolling Stones-in-waiting. The Cure: Anniversary 1978-2018 Live in Hyde Park London arrives in cinemas on Thursday 11 July
Murder Mystery Netflix review: "Sandler and Aniston bring freewheeling energy to a caricatured caper"
Adam and Jen play the brash American couple who embark on a dream holiday to Europe, only to become caught up in a billion-dollar bloodbath
The classic husband-and-wife sleuth team was Nick and Nora Charles — popularised in the 1930s and 40s Thin Man film series by William Powell and Myrna Loy. Crime-cracking couples have flourished on TV since (Hart to Hart, McMillan & Wife, Castle), but this Netflix-funded revival is more like Manhattan Murder Mystery on the Med, with Adam Sandler as a promotion-shy New York cop and Jennifer Aniston as his crime-fiction-fan wife. New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day Top Netflix TV series Top 50 Netflix movies More Netflix news and recommendations <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2017/12/TheCrown_210_Unit_00197_R-a6b2b25.jpg" width="6000" height="4000" alt="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" title="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" /> In the creaking set-up of James Vanderbilt’s derivative screenplay, Aniston charms Luke Evans’s English viscount on a flight to Europe, and he invites her and Sandler to join him on his family’s superyacht. There, we are introduced to a motley parade of inheritance-chasers (David Walliams, Gemma Arterton, Adeel Akhtar among them), who hope patriarch Terence Stamp croaks before signing away his billion-dollar fortune to his young wife. The corpses mount up as our heroes fall under suspicion and learn to mend their marriage between predictable predicaments on a high ledge, under a conjugal bed, and behind the wheel on a Grand Prix circuit — all perfunctorily staged by TV director Kyle Newacheck. Sandler and Aniston bring freewheeling energy to the caricatured caper, but ultimately fail to convince us this is franchise-worthy material. Murder Mystery is on Netflix View oEmbed on the source website
These are the greatest TV theme tunes of all time – but which is your favourite?
Radio Times and BFI have compiled a shortlist of 60 iconic tunes – now Andrew Collins wants you to pick your favourite
This weekend, my Classic FM show Saturday Night at the Movies will be devoted not to the sweeping suites and symphonies of the silver screen but the signature tunes that serenade the credits on the small screen. Arguably more musically experimental – consider the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s squelching synth treatments of Ron Grainer’s Doctor Who opener from 1963 – TV works our nostalgia glands in more direct form. Just think of galloping teatime favourite Black Beauty by Denis King, Barrington Pheloung’s melancholy distress signal for Inspector Morse, or Michael Price and David Arnold’s timeless refrains for Sherlock. What is Britain's greatest TV theme tune? VOTE NOW Few programmes risk getting underway without the gear-change of an identifying musical signature, even those cool, US-influenced dramas that esoterically begin with what’s called a “cold open” – a pre-credits teaser to set the scene before a theme accompanies the dissolving roll-call of actors and crew. This deferment means a show isn’t really on the road until what Little Britain’s Denis Waterman called the “feem tune”. Some hum-along openers spawn chart-topping monsters, such as the Eye Level theme from 70s ITV crime-solver Van der Valk (a UK number one for the Simon Park Orchestra) or reality pioneer Big Brother (number 4 in its first series in 2000 for the DJ duo Elementfour). View oEmbed on the source website There’s a bottomless archive via YouTube and others, just waiting to be piped into your ears to provide a joyfully Pavlovian response. Which is why we’re launching the search for the nation’s favourite TV theme based on a shortlist of 60 drawn up with the BFI. The credits sequence has evolved unrecognisably since the glowing police lamp at the start of Dixon of Dock Green in 1955 and its melancholy harmonica rendition of Jeff Darnell’s blues. The introduction of colour was epitomised by the titles of 70s school sitcom Please Sir!, whose credits were graffiti-ed across a bright orange wall to the big-band-style strains of School’s Out by Sam Fonteyn. In the same era, a silhouetted-in-flame lady grooved to Ron Grainer’s cimbalom-accented Tales of the Unexpected waltz. These are all cultural building blocks for square-eyed music-lovers from an era when fast-forward was not an option. No wonder they sank in so deeply. The two hours of themes I’ll be showcasing on Saturday will mix fondly remembered but often stoically functional establishers with today’s more esoteric dreamscapes. The multi-channel scramble for your attention means even a primetime terrestrial credits sequence can become a Turner Prize entry, with tantalising mood-board flashes in place of the traditional cut-out head shots of the principal cast – and with music to match. Whereas the classics hark back to a simpler time: the gauche Grange Hill theme (Chicken Man by Alan Hawkshaw) and the whooshing downhill strings of Ski Sunday (Pop Looks Bach by Sam Fonteyn again) were both composed for music libraries, while Test Match Special appropriated the title track from a 1968 Booker T and the MGs album, Soul Limbo. Whether you disagree with songwriter Eric Idle’s assessment that One Foot in the Grave has “passed its own sell-by date”, or still find yourself singing along to Dick James “riding through the glen” at the end of ITV’s Adventures of Robin Hood, we need your vote to establish the runners and riders. The results will be unveiled at a session I’m hosting with Mr Bean and Blackadder maestro Howard Goodall at the BFI & Radio Times Television Festival on Saturday 13th April at London’s BFI Southbank. We’ve longlisted British programme themes only, although Dance of the Knights from Russian composer Prokofiev’s ballet music for Romeo and Juliet is eligible as it’s known to the majority of us as “the Apprentice theme”: dahda-da da-da da-da da-da-da-da-da-dah-DAH… What is the greatest TV theme tune? Vote here The list of 60 themes was compiled with the BFI; the poll closes at midnight on 31 March 2019. Read on for the 60 shortlisted tunes... Children's/Family category Animal Magic, Black Beauty, Blockbusters, Blue Peter, Doctor Who, Grange Hill (’78), Postman Pat, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Thunderbirds, Vision On Crime Dixon of Dock Green, Inspector Morse, Juliet Bravo, Luther, Midsomer Murders, Minder, Sherlock, The Sweeney, Van der Valk, Z Cars Period pieces All Creatures Great and Small, Downton Abbey, Poirot, Poldark (2015), Robin of Sherwood, The Life and Times of David Lloyd George, The Onedin Line, Upstairs, Downstairs (’71), Victoria, Wolf Hall Sitcom/Comedy Dad’s Army, Father Ted, Fawlty Towers, Jeeves and Wooster, Mr Bean, One Foot in the Grave, Only Fools and Horses, Please Sir!, Steptoe and Son, The Office Classics Coronation Street, EastEnders, Emmerdale, Last of the Summer Wine, Match of the Day, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Tales of the Unexpected, The South Bank Show, The World at War, Whicker’s World (’58) Miscellaneous Countdown, Doctor Foster, Dr Finlay’s Casebook, Formula 1, Man in a Suitcase, Mastermind, Test Match Special, The Apprentice, The Avengers (’65), The Persuaders!
Triple Frontier – Netflix movie review: "swaps narrative nuance for generic action"
Ben Affleck and Oscar Isaac plan a daring raid on a narcotics kingpin in this testosterone-heavy heist movie from JC Chandor
★★ Director JC Chandor specialises in male crises, whether in high finance (Margin Call) or on a stricken yacht (All Is Lost). But this South American-set escape thriller, co-written with Zero Dark Thirty’s Mark Boal, swaps narrative nuance for generic action, as an all-purpose, testosterone-pumped raid on the jungle hideaway of a narcotics kingpin by five mercenaries morphs into an epic test of endurance in the style of The Way Back. New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day Top Netflix TV series Top 50 Netflix movies More Netflix news and recommendations <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2017/12/TheCrown_210_Unit_00197_R-a6b2b25.jpg" width="6000" height="4000" alt="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" title="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" /> There are hints, too, of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, as suave leader Oscar Isaac, reckless Charlie Hunnam, depressed Ben Affleck, cowboy Garrett Hedlund and quiet Pedro Pascal (Narcos) partially bungle a Robin Hood-style heist through their own greed. While earthily enough shot in Colombia and Hawaii, the story strains as much as the seams of the gym-bulked squad’s vests. There are enjoyable moments, such as when the cash burdens the team's escape through cocaine plantations and eventually over the Andes, where a bonfire of banknotes keeps them warm. But it all boils back down to manly hugs, combat codenames ("Catfish", "Pope") and "full-on cowboy s**t". Uniquely for Chandor, we’ve seen it all before. Triple Frontier is on Netflix View oEmbed on the source website
The Highwaymen – Netflix movie review: another side to the ballad of Bonnie and Clyde
Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson play the lawmen who brought down the Depression-era outlaws in this handsome drama
★★★★ Director of the 2004 retelling of The Alamo, John Lee Hancock, and Young Guns screenwriter John Fusco replay the ballad of Bonnie and Clyde from the point of view of the two retired Texas Rangers who, on 23 May 1934, ended the pair’s deadly crime spree in a hail of bullets. Paunchy Frank Hamer (Kevin Costner) and his recovering alcoholic partner Manny Gault (Woody Harrelson) are Depression-era equivalents of the two minor characters in Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (which demoted Hamlet to a cameo). Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow are similarly sidelined here, glimpsed in long shot or a close-up of Bonnie’s heels. New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day Top Netflix TV series Top 50 Netflix movies More Netflix news and recommendations <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2017/12/TheCrown_210_Unit_00197_R-a6b2b25.jpg" width="6000" height="4000" alt="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" title="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" /> It’s an original if predominantly talky approach, handsomely staged in Louisiana, with a light piano score from Thomas Newman and an ear for the times ("Jiminy Christmas!" exclaims a pious Costner). Although more male-oriented than Arthur Penn’s 1967 account (Kathy Bates appears as Texas governor "Ma" Ferguson and Kim Dickens as Hamer’s wife), you’ll still cheer on our out-of-date lawmen on as they eschew wiretapping and other new-fangled novelties in favour of getting the job done the old way. Hancock turns the outlaws’ fame into a narrative device and succeeds in rescuing Hamer’s reputation after he was played as an incompetent in Penn's Bonnie and Clyde. The Highwaymen arrives on Netflix on 29 March View oEmbed on the source website
High Flying Bird – Netflix movie review: Soderbergh's got game
Basketball players set about taking back control from the NBA in Steven Soderbergh's second iPhone-shot feature
★★★ If you don’t follow professional basketball, Steven Soderbergh’s drama offers an intensive crash course into what’s known as a "lockout", which is when the collective-bargaining agreement between the NBA (National Basketball Association) and the Players Association collapses and games are suspended. Soderbergh and playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney (Moonlight) weave a talky, constantly fist-bumping story around a fictional moratorium that centres on persuasive agent André Holland (who originated the story), assistant Zazie Beetz (a superstar in the making), rival rep Sonja Sohn (a regular in The Wire) and hot-headed baller Melvin Gregg (TV’s UnREAL), and moves constantly between office, street, apartment, sauna and the court at a Bronx high school. New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day Top Netflix TV series Top 50 Netflix movies More Netflix news and recommendations <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2017/12/TheCrown_210_Unit_00197_R-a6b2b25.jpg" width="6000" height="4000" alt="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" title="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" /> Like previous film Unsane, Soderbergh shoots on a mobile phone – this time the iPhone 8– and its custom widescreen lens pleasingly distorts at the edges as it bends the pixels into frame, while fixed shots at tabletop or floor level are crisp and bright. Purists may feel it lacks a certain grain and renders the reality flat. And when Holland hustles his client with "Netflix wants to sit down tomorrow, only thing they don’t have is live streaming," you’ll either applaud the metatextuality in a film released by Netflix or boo the ostentatious product placement. High Flying Bird is on Netflix View oEmbed on the source website
"It was an awkward, stressful few months": Simon Mayo reveals what went wrong at BBC Radio 2
The former Drivetime presenter opens up about his ill-fated partnership with Jo Whiley, and what the future holds on new station Scala Radio
Simon Mayo has a favourite word. It’s a compound German word, but then he’s a smart fellow, with a degree in history and politics. For him, this word encapsulates everything that went wrong in 2018 and turned it into the worst year of his otherwise charmed and illustrious professional life. He reveals it over coffee and biscuits in a hotel that sits in the shadow of New Broadcasting House in London: the word is Verschlimmbesserung. “Splendidly, it means an improvement that makes things worse,” he explains. Sara Cox to become new host of BBC Radio 2’s Drivetime Simon Mayo to leave Radio 2 after 17 years Meet Bob Shennan, the man behind BBC’s The Biggest Weekend – and the overhaul of Radio 2 Not quite in full Confessions mode but keen to clear the air, the broadcaster, whose modest ambition is to be “the friend behind the mic”, is in a much happier place now than he was last May when Radio 2 management made the “improvement” of merging his popular show with another popular show, thereby poisoning both and throwing the network into turmoil. View oEmbed on the source website The nightmare began last January, when Radio 2 controller Lewis Carnie announced that Mayo’s Sony award-winning Drivetime show would in future be co-hosted with Jo Whiley, another cherished fixture, who’d be uprooted from the bright evening show she’d presented since 2011. “It was an awkward, stressful few months,” Mayo now admits, finally putting his spiky hair above the parapet. The change was belatedly intended to address the gender imbalance of daytime Radio 2, whose weekdays had been fronted exclusively by white, middle-aged men since Sarah Kennedy’s early show was pushed back to before 7am in 2010. But it was executed with a blunt instrument, and drove one of its favourite faces to resign after 36 years at the BBC. That it made things worse is not just my personal take; as soon as the new format was rolled out, angry letters from listeners started pouring in to Radio Times. People despaired that “the magic of the show has disappeared”, that Whiley had been “shoehorned in”, and that Mayo’s long-running Confessions feature was “nowhere near as entertaining” without sports reporter Matt Williams. Reader Charlotte Fitzgerald in Ilford spoke for millions when she wrote, “Why fix something that wasn’t broken?” Bob Shennan, former Radio 2 controller and now BBC’s Director of Radio and Music, responded to the biggest Radio Times postbag since the indecipherable dialogue in Jamaica Inn with the airless statement: “I’m delighted that two of Radio 2’s most popular presenters are now presenting a brand new show each weekday, which I’m confident will become one of the network’s most listened to shows.” On the contrary, it drove listeners away. Mayo announced his departure on 22 October. A valedictory solo All-Request Friday ended his 17-year tenure at Radio 2 on 21 December. His own, loaded, first request was Born to Run. There’s now a light at the end of the tunnel. On 4th March, Mayo will be a high-profile cog in the launch line-up of a new digital station, Scala (the brainchild of German publisher-turned-broadcaster Bauer). It threatens, according to the press release, to “break the mould of classical music in the UK”, by aiming at 40- to 60-year olds as keen to hear A Star is Born as Swan Lake, Herbie Hancock as Handel. Mayo will host a 10am-to-1pm show, interactive, topical and feature-led. It’s his chance, he says, to “get back on the radio and be a part of people’s lives again”. If five helpings of Mayo isn’t enough, his Friday afternoon Film Review with Mark Kermode on BBC Radio 5 Live will continue as if nothing has happened. Mayo will straddle the commercial and public sectors. Management can bend when it wants to. Mayo retains a deep debt to 5 Live. Joining the news and sport network from Radio 1 in 2001 made him the broadcaster he is today. Like a kid who had his lunch money stolen, he recalls the sneers when he – a tour-jacketed pop-adoodle-doo-type jock! – followed Nicky Campbell into the cut-and-thrust of current affairs. “There was a bit of ‘Who does he think he is?’ It was a sceptical environment.” But the naysaying stopped the day the planes hit the Twin Towers in 2001 while Mayo was on air and he held it together consummately. “I remember looking through the glass and seeing the director of BBC radio, the head of 5 Live and director general Greg Dyke all there, staring at the screens, thinking, ‘Should we evacuate?’” He describes his nine years on 5 Live as “absolutely the most full-on work I’ve ever done”, especially after having grown used to the radio backstop of being able to “go to a record”, a luxury not open to the speech radio presenter. “I was aware that people thought I couldn’t do it, so I had to be the most prepared person in the room. OK, we’re going to do a 20-minute piece about the periodic table, then your next guest disappears and a 20-minute slot becomes 40. So what are you gonna do? I always think in every interview I’m one question away from disaster.” Switching to Radio 2 in January 2010 was a relief: “Drivetime was the show I’d always wanted.” Having turned 50, he was able to “go to a record” and do as his theme tune by Prince Buster instructed: “Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.” Last year was his annus horribilis. I can attest to the stress it put on him. I first met Mayo in 1993 at Radio 1 when Mark Goodier recruited Stuart Maconie and me as breakfast-show sidekicks while he was on paternity leave. Last June, a few weeks into the new Drivetime format, he and I appeared at an event where authors are quizzed about their new books, down the road from where he lives in north London with his wife Hilary, two sons and a daughter. Having turned his hand to writing, Mayo was promoting his fifth novel, Mad Blood Stirring – his first aimed at adults rather than young adults. Our host, RT’s David Hepworth, broached the subject of reaction to the new Radio 2 show but Mayo refused to be drawn. Afterwards, he asked if I fancied meeting to discuss the differences between commercial and public-service broadcasting. (I had experience of both, whereas he’d been a BBC man exclusively since joining Radio Nottingham in 1982.) We started to meet regularly in the same Soho tea-room. Our conversations were necessarily private but he won’t mind if I report that his demeanour moved between disappointment, reflection and anger at the way he was being treated. Still preceded by his career-long reputation as one of the good guys, it seemed that pastures new beckoned. This new atmosphere of flux at BBC Radio recalled the tenure of future-facing Radio 1 controller Matthew Bannister, who arguably made things better by making them worse when his generational spring-clean shed five million listeners but modernised Radio 1 for a younger audience. Mayo remembers with a shudder DJ Dave Lee Travis’s infamously pompous on-air resignation (“Changes are being made that go against my principles”). In contrast, his own in 2018 would be long and drawn out. Does he remember the meeting when management proposed the change to Drivetime? “It wasn’t a meeting, it was a phone call from my agent saying she’d had a visit from Lewis Carnie who’d said, ‘Co-presenting is the future.’” So, it was sold to you as something positive? “I wasn’t sure how positive, but yeah. I was concerned that they’d pluck a co-presenter out of a bag somewhere, and I said it needed to be Jo. I’ve known her for a long time, and our families had been on holiday together.” Does Radio 2 really think co-hosting is the future? “No. My guess is that there was genuine pressure from the top about improving the number of women in daytime. And they looked at the radio I do and the fact I’ve worked with Mark [Kermode] for many years, and thought, ‘He might at least give it a go.’ Because if you suggested it to… some of my former colleagues, they know it wouldn’t have worked.” Was there any sense of “if it doesn’t work, we’ll reverse it”? “No. Never, ever any question. They’d invested too much political capital in the change.” You were the victims of a bad decision. “I think victim’s the wrong word. Jo and I worked very hard to make that show as good as it could be.” It’s at this point that Spurs fan Mayo plays his football analogy joker: “When Gary Lineker went to Barcelona in 1986 under manager Terry Venables, he was a huge hit. [He scored 21 goals in 41 games that first season, including a hat-trick against rivals Real Madrid.] Then Johan Cruyff took over and played him out of position, moving him to the right of midfield, and he wasn’t very happy. And he ended up moving to Spurs.” Whether Scala will provide Mayo with the equivalent of winning the 1991 FA Cup remains to be seen, but he’ll be happier. “Jo and I were both still playing for the team,” he insists. “But we were being played out of position. Scala offers me the chance to play in position. Among the thousands of tweets and emails, one guy said that Drivetime was ‘the easiest and happiest radio he’d ever listened to’. He didn’t mind where I went next, he just wanted me to be me again.” View oEmbed on the source website Chris Evans, whose departure from Radio 2 helped clear the gender deadlock, offered Mayo a job at Virgin. “He rang me and said, ‘Do you want to work here?’ I said, ‘I’m already spoken for.’ He said, ‘I’ve got an audience of 8.7 million.’ I said, ‘Where I’m going we haven’t got any listeners at all. We’re starting from zero!’” The cards seem to have landed well. Evans has a new playground, Zoe Ball’s at breakfast, Sara Cox is at Drivetime and Radio 2 is finally feminised. But it was a grim transition. “Yeah,” Mayo nods, considering his words as carefully as a diplomat. “It’s not the way I’d have designed it. The show that Drivetime became was the most perfect reflection of who I was as a person and gave Radio 2 the highest listening figures it ever had. I don’t think enough thought had gone into the impact that change would have.” Was it harder on Jo Whiley than you? (She later told The Mail on Sunday, the agony was “relentless, every hour of every day”.) “It was difficult for both of us, but for different reasons. Jo got the stick online because she was taking the blame for the new format. It was totally unfair. I said to management, ‘Never do that again.’ My wife said I was far more outspoken on air when I was presenting with Jo than on my own. It brought out a different side to me. Radio is very personal. It revolves around atmosphere and mood, and I don’t think there’s any doubt that we were asked to do things that we’d not intended to do. And it showed on air, and that inevitably makes work harder. No question. It was stressful. I went to the gym more often.” He shows me the Happy Playlist he works out to in times of strife – it includes When the Ship Goes Down by Cypress Hill, I Love LA by Randy Newman, Working on the Highway by Bruce Springsteen and Bach’s Partita No 1 in B flat – but he magnanimously concludes, “The overwhelming gratitude I have after 36 years eclipses the difficulties of the last months.” He admits that he won’t miss having his salary revealed in the press every year (£340,000- £349,000 at the last count in July, more than Vanessa Feltz, less than Nick Grimshaw), nor the Corporation’s historic failure to communicate with talent. Mayo tells me that in 1998, he learned that his BBC1 Confessions show hadn’t been recommissioned when he was commiserated with by an ice-cream seller on Dartmoor. Although at 60 he admits to not dealing that well with ageing (“That’s why Kermode always says I dress like a teenager”), he can take heart from having established himself as a published author, whose third young-adult novel Blame is being adapted into a screenplay by Harry Potter and the Cursed Child scribe Jack Thorne, and he’s off to Perth this month to see his first children’s book turned into a drama for ABC in Australia. “I considered just concentrating on the writing,” he admits, “but radio is what I do.” After two hours of setting the record straight, we notice that it’s later than we think. As we pack up to leave, he ruefully considers his legacy: “I’ll be remembered as one who sacrificed himself for a noble cause – for better daytime radio!” After another thoughtful pause and with an enigmatic smile: “I hope they’re grateful.” Simon Mayo’s Scala radio show begins on 4th March 2019
If Beale Street Could Talk review: "an achingly romantic but hard-centred slice of life"
Barry Jenkins follows his Oscar-winning Moonlight with another powerful tale of the black experience in America
★★★★★ Early editions of James Baldwin’s Harlem-set love story If Beale Street Could Talk tended towards typographical cover design, or else they were dominated by a somewhat misleadingly Hollywood-ised illustration of two sunlit young black people in love. What you might regard as the novel’s “Capulet and Capulet” romance, staged in the early 1970s, is not one that’s kept apart by warring families – although the pious religiosity of one side shows scorn to the less devout. Rather, it’s the institutional racism of everyday life, especially for young black people trying to get along, that rends its lovers – 22-year-old Fonny and 19-year-old Tish – asunder. View oEmbed on the source website In 1962, Baldwin penned a long piece for the New Yorker about the institutional barriers and social assumptions of an upbringing in predominantly African-American ghettoes. “Perhaps,” he wrote, “we were, all of us – pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children – bound together by the nature of our oppression.” Such observations, as lived through rather than purely theoretical, made him a unique chronicler, autodidact and orator for the Civil Rights era. Writer/director Barry Jenkins follows the lauded, Oscar-winning Moonlight with an achingly romantic but hard-centred slice of life. It is the false accusation by a Puerto Rican woman of rape by Fonny (Stephan James) that drives the tragedy. Opening in prison, a voiceover from Tish (KiKi Layne) proclaims, “I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass” – a reference to the partition that separates visitor from inmate in prison. Such poetry confirms this as a thematic, artistic and political cousin to Moonlight, which unfolded over three time periods. The narrative here is more straightforward, but builds a picture through flashback of a relationship that seems to offer healing power to its protagonists. Like Moonlight, this is a film of uncommon beauty (shot once more by James Laxton) and deep emotional resonance (underscored by Moonlight composer Nicholas Britell). The film also offers an unashamedly idealised depiction of love and hate (the latter grimacingly embodied by Ed Skrein’s racist cop), and deliberately so, as if to make the heartache of this couple’s separation after a swooningly decorous courtship even more painful. (It’s been noted that in Baldwin’s words, the “beautiful” Fonny of Tish’s gaze perhaps is less of an Adonis, with “skin like raw, wet potato” and “bunions on his ankle bones”, while James is a picture of chiselled beauty.) Elsewhere, Regina King brings full righteous power to Tish’s mother in a one-woman quest to talk her future son-in-law’s “victim” into withdrawing her accusation, while Colman Domingo and Michael Beach find peace over a few drinks in a bar while the women of the families are at war. The acting and staging, especially during the big, noisy family showdown, are impeccable. Jenkins takes the same risks he took with the three unknown actors playing Chiron in Moonlight with the casting of Layne and James. Their shared sexual awakening is charged by a raw passion and anxious chivalry in a suitably grotty basement where Fonny creates modern art out of rough hunks of wood – another apparent reason not to lock up this artistic soul. Some audiences may find the whole thing a little overplayed and underlined. The opening courtship scene feels like it may explode into a La La Land-esque dance routine at any moment. Your reaction will either be to run with the heightened emotion or run for the exit. The experience of watching If Beale Street Could Talk makes the world of Moonlight feel even more important and contemporary. But then it should do, as Moonlight concludes in the present day and explores homosexuality in a way that would perplex characters in Beale Street. Even Byron Tyree Henry’s fulsomely played ex-prisoner is able only to hint that he was sexually assaulted in the penitentiary while covering his semaphored abuse with light-hearted, beer-lubricated male banter. You sense a real body of work forming here. The director is said to be developing another novel about the black experience, this time slavery in The Underground Railroad. If Beale Street could talk, it might very well sound like Barry Jenkins. If Beale Street Could Talk is released in cinemas on Friday 8 February
Back in December, we asked you to choose your favourite screen Sherlock, either from our shortlist of ten, or by suggesting your own preferred deerstalkered diagnostician. That Benedict Cumberbatch, dashingly infuriating sociopath of BBC One’s Sherlock, remained way out in front throughout — and won the day — is testament to the welly of his fanbase. It was warming to see Jeremy Brett (whose eccentric Holmes fronted Granada TV’s 41-episode 1980s/90s series) come in second. Basil Rathbone was third (and the most popular of the big-screen Holmeses), his 14 feature-length cases (ten on TCM this week) moving from the Victorian era to the 1930s and 40s. Favourites not on our original shortlist who made your top five include Robert Downey Jr in Guy Ritchie’s pair of steampunk revivals, Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes: a Game of Shadows, and Jonny Lee Miller as Benedict’s funkily contemporary rival in Elementary on Sky Living/Sky Witness. Full marks, too, if you voted for Soviet TV star Vasily Livanov or Englishman Douglas Wilmer, inaugural star of the BBC’s mid-1960s run, later replaced by Peter Cushing. Cushing and Wilmer came in at six and seven, respectively. Here's the full list of your top ten Sherlocks: 1. Benedict Cumberbatch 2. Jeremy Brett 3. Basil Rathbone 4. Robert Downey Jr 5. Jonny Lee Miller 6. Peter Cushing 7. Douglas Wilmer 8. Vasily Livanov 9. Ian McKellen 10. Robert Stephens Now vote to have your say on the greatest film theme of all time!
Springsteen on Broadway – Netflix movie review: An intimate night in with the Boss
Up close and personal in New York, Bruce revisits signature songs from a career spanning more than 40 years
★★★★★ As a rule, concert films are functional but valuable souvenirs for fans. Occasionally, though, they record music history (Woodstock, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars) or an innovative way to stage a show (Stop Making Sense). Springsteen on Broadway is a filmed record of Bruce’s sell-out, no-bells, no-whistles residency at New York’s modest 975-seat Walter Kerr Theatre between 2017-18. New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day Top Netflix TV series Top 50 Netflix movies More Netflix news and recommendations <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2017/12/TheCrown_210_Unit_00197_R-a6b2b25.jpg" width="6000" height="4000" alt="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" title="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" /> Keen to enjoy a more intimate connection with his audience, the veteran chronicler of working-class life draws from a 40-year songbook. But this stripped-down show (guitar, piano, guest duet with wife Patti Scialfa) is as much about verbal storytelling as banging out his back catalogue. Reciting from his 2016 autobiography, "The Boss" is open and honest, gaily deconstructing his own wide-open-road mythos by confessing to an early failure to master the stick-shift of a friend’s car. Over a dozen songs emerge naturally from the autobiographical narrative, a highlight being Born in the USA reinterpreted as a tender blues song. At two-and-a-half-hours, it ought to drag; instead it builds with poetic flourishes and self-examination: "I've never seen the inside of a factory and yet it's all I've written about." He earns warm laughter when confessing to the absurdity of his legend, knocking ’em dead with the conclusion, "That's how good I am." At the end of the road, our muscular, croaky host says, "I hope I've been a good travelling companion." On this entertaining, moving – unobtrusively documented by director Thom Zimny – he was born to run and run. Springsteen on Broadway is available on Netflix View oEmbed on the source website
Colette review: “a thoughtful and relevant period drama”
Keira Knightley is perfectly cast as the feminist icon in this reverent and handsome true-life story
★★★★ A sensation during the Belle Époque in turn-of-the-century France, the literary, artistic and feminist icon Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born to be played by Keira Knightley, who’s in her willowy, defiant element in this decorously titillating account. It concentrates on the years of Colette’s marriage to the older Henry Gauthier-Villars, a publisher-about town fleshed out by a harrumphingly priapic Dominic West. He published his talented wife’s saucy stories of the fictional libertine Claudine under the nom de plume “Willy” (stop sniggering at the back), for reasons of patriarchal orthodoxy that the public wouldn’t buy books written by women. Literarily repressed, Colette refused to take her second-class status lying down, and Knightley comes into her own. View oEmbed on the source website Colette’s stories have been intermittently adapted for the screen, most notably her then-racy Claudine novels in the silent era, and more sensationally the Leslie Caron musical Gigi in 1958. The writer herself was portrayed by French actress Mathilda May in the German/French/UK co-production Becoming Colette in 1991, directed by Danny Huston and considered something of a Euro-pudding. It was written in English and spoken in pidgin English, and didn’t stint on the soft-focus sapphism. Director Wash Westmoreland (Still Alice) wrote this far more thoughtful and politically relevant version of the same period in Colette’s vibrant life with his late husband Richard Glatzer, an avowed Francophile who died in 2015, and British playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, who scripted Ida and Disobedience. For all its virtue-signalling in the direction of modern sexual politics, it looks and feels every inch like a period drama from the school of Merchant Ivory. Impeccably shot by cinematographer Giles Nuttgens (Hallam Foe, Midnight’s Children), it delights in stiff collars, inky quills, chugging cars and heavy drapes, and you sense the echoing weight of footfall on oak floorboards. Even as the young wife on an old roué’s arm in the salons of Paris, Colette experiments publicly with sexual mores and enjoys approved extramarital relationships with Louisianan heiress Georgie (Poldark’s Eleanor Tomlinson, out of sorts with a southern drawl) and brazen cross-dressing scenester “Missy” (Denise Gough), whose “gaydar” twitched a century before the term was coined. Knightley’s determination plays across her clenched jaw and fiery eyes, while Westmoreland depicts these socially dangerous liaisons frankly and passionately, but without exploitation of the actors’ flesh. Gough is among the film’s stand-out supporting players among a sterling cast also including Fiona Shaw and Robert Pugh. There are some nice cats, too. Meanwhile, the predominantly British and Irish cast eschew ’Allo ’Allo accents. This will further irritate those who would prefer a French film set in France to be in French, but it cuts out the distraction of comic enunciation. Equally, the Hungarian locations, exquisitely shot and sparingly CGI-ed (except for an establishing exterior of the Moulin Rouge), evoke provincial and urban France without strain. Although it’s become commonplace now for progressive filmmakers and actors to claim #MeToo credentials for just about any film that gets made, Westmoreland can’t be criticised for announcing Colette in interviews as “the story of a heterosexual marriage with a very strong LGBTQ element… it’s a very queer story”. He also adds that Willy had “all the advantages of male power”. Thus, when Knightley’s journey of enlightenment puts her in the room for theatre’s first same-sex kiss, Colette’s connection to the modern struggle for authentic identity is more than just wishful thinking. Colette is released in cinemas on Wednesday 9th January
Vote for your favourite screen Sherlock Holmes
The game’s afoot! It’s time to choose the ideal Holmes
This week’s case is a far-from-elementary one: who is the greatest Sherlock Holmes from cinema and TV? Guinness World Records has the great detective as “the most portrayed movie character”, starting with the 30-second American silent Baffled from 1900 (shown on a single-viewer device). His latest incarnation is Will Ferrell in boisterous comedic take Holmes and Watson (in cinemas from Boxing Day). So, more than enough pipe-sucking logicians from whom to choose. To deduce the ideal Holmes, we’ve come up with a top ten in chronological order. But the final vote is yours. Read all about them, then scroll to the bottom to make your choice… John Barrymore (1922) Mr Barrymore (pictured, left), as he is listed in the credits of once-lost silent Sherlock Holmes (adapted from a play by William Gillette but based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories), gives Holmes a suavely scatty demeanour. Described in one intertitle as “a marvel at digging out things”, he takes years to pin the blame on Moriarty in this case, but he models the pipe and smoking jacket rather well along the way. Basil Rathbone (1939-46) Arguably the definitive silver-screen Sherlock, Shakespearean stage star Rathbone went a long way to hallmarking the Holmes of lore over 14 films (currently available on TCM), ranging from first film in the series and location grandstander The Hound of the Baskervilles (Mon, Wed) to chamber pieces like the train-set Terror by Night (Fri 14 Dec). With Nigel Bruce’s slow-witted, colonially inclined Watson (“Great Scott!”), little beats the duo’s clipped repartee. Christopher Lee (1962) Having played Sir Henry Baskerville opposite Peter Cushing’s Holmes in Hammer’s 1959 Hound of the Baskervilles, Lee snatched the pipe to star in dubbed black-and-white Euro-pudding Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (directed by Hammer’s Terence Fisher). He’s at home by the hearth and lankily debonair in a cape, but the production is cheap and beneath his and — as Watson — Thorley Walters’s talents. Peter Cushing (1968) Not to be outmanoeuvred by Lee, Cushing went long-form in Sherlock Holmes for BBC1. Facially suited (he’s introduced in silhouetted profile in the credits), he essayed a camply rakish incarnation, taking over from Douglas Wilmer for the show’s second run in 1968. Another Nigel — Stock — warmed up Watson and, despite theatrical staging on chipboard sets, its casting was spot-on. One case, The Blue Carbuncle, featured Dad’s Army spiv James Beck as the butler. In modern parlance Cushing owned it, but no third series was ordered. Nicol Williamson (1976) Rangy Scottish thesp Nicol Williamson doesn’t actually play Sherlock Holmes in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, an arch, lavishly all-star 70s pastiche based on the bestselling novel by Nicholas Meyer, but a deluded man who thinks he is. A harassed Moriarty (Laurence Olivier) asks Watson (a horribly miscast Robert Duvall) to have his friend psychoanalysed by Freud (Alan Arkin). Williamson is left to dash about like a manic loon. Peter Cook (1977) Comic portrayals of Holmes abound but few match Peter Cook and Dudley Moore as a prissy Holmes and a Welsh Watson in full-on spoof The Hound of the Baskervilles, filmed at Hammer’s Bray Studios and cast from comedy’s top drawer: Kenneth Williams, Terry-Thomas, Max Wall, Joan Greenwood, “with a fleeting appearance by Spike Milligan”. Cook gives Holmes a speech impediment and a domineering mother who calls him “Shirl”. They even work in an Exorcist gag. Jeremy Brett (1984-94) The connoisseur’s Holmes, for the sheer eccentricity and physicality Brett brought to the part and the 41 faithful adaptations Granada racked up over ten years… Brett called the part “harder than Hamlet or Macbeth”. An assiduous researcher, he aimed for authoritative perfection and Sherlock’s quasi-bipolar personality came to echo his own. A New York Times obituary in 1995 declared Brett’s Holmes “quintessential”. Benedict Cumberbatch (2010-present) While Elementary stacks up season upon season on CBS with Jonny Lee Miller as a post-rehab Holmes in Manhattan, our own beloved Benedict is rationed by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss into “event” mini-series that strut like a grown-up Doctor Who. Cumberbatch’s nicotine-patched Sherlock and Martin Freeman’s Afghanistan-vet Watson text, Google and GPS, and generate real emotional jeopardy with fancy narrative footwork over four increasingly complex seasons. The deerstalker is now ironic. Ian McKellen (2015) Certainly the oldest screen Sherlock, McKellen’s post-Second World War diagnostician retires aged 93 to a beekeeper’s idyll, in the sedate, flashback-driven Mr Holmes (based on Mitch Cullin’s 2005 novel, A Slight Trick of the Mind). There, he paternally encourages housekeeper’s son Milo Parker to develop his investigative skills while grappling with an account of his last case. McKellen brings a funereal pace and the dignity of age to the detective. Johnny Depp (2018) A slight cheat, as Depp appears in voice only in the self-consciously pop-driven US/UK animation Sherlock Gnomes. But he takes the English accent seriously enough and allows a hint of Jack Sparrow into his actually upright and traditional case-solver — when he’s not sniffing the ground like a bloodhound or duelling with Moriarty (a Pillsbury Doughboy-like mascot) on Tower Bridge. If the animators based this Holmes on a previous model, then it’s surely Rathbone.
The American Meme – Netflix movie review: The dark side of social media
An intimate portrait of self-made celebrities who found fame and fortune on the internet
★★★ As this surprisingly non-judgemental documentary about social media celebrities attests, their livelihood runs on the cryptocurrency of "likes" (usually denoted by a thumbs-up symbol). Bert Marcus’s intimate portrait of half-a-dozen narcissists who self-started on Instagram, YouTube and video platform Vine (until it was disabled in 2016), is less easy to love than the producer/director’s well-received 2017 history of the DJ, What We Started. First-hand access to key players from the famous-for-being-famous netherworld introduces onanistic spoof-jock Josh Ostrovsky (aka "The Fat Jew"), aspiring character comic Brittany Furlan, Russian-born party host Kirill Bichutsky (the "Slut Whisperer") and Paris Hilton, the heiress who reinvented herself as a dog-outfits brand. New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day Top Netflix TV series Top 50 Netflix movies More Netflix news and recommendations <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2017/12/TheCrown_210_Unit_00197_R-a6b2b25.jpg" width="6000" height="4000" alt="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" title="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" /> All are trapped in a vortex of self-promotion and stunts (one throws dollars off a roof, shouting, "Let’s make it rain on Hollywood Boulevard!"), and although Hilton seems the sanest, she admits she’s minus "part of my soul". The film is ultimately rather sad: the sassy Furlan can’t get taken seriously as an actor, post-Vine, while Bichutsky, too old for wet T-shirt contests at 33, admits he’s lonely. Without labouring the point, Marcus reveals the existential emptiness at the centre of this entire, precarious new economy. After all, when Furlan hooks up with Pamela Anderson’s ex Tommy Lee, she loses 100,000 followers in an instant. The American Meme is available now on Netflix
They Shall Not Grow Old review: "a memorial that resonates like no other documentary"
Peter Jackson's staggering First World War documentary combines restored footage and a collage of commentary to create a truly immersive picture of a nation at war
★★★★★ Planned to mark the centenary of the cessation of hostilities at the end of the Great War in 1918, Peter Jackson’s painstaking re-creation of the prelude, the horror and the aftermath of the First World War draws on technology nobody could have dreamed of a century ago. Silent footage has been restored, subtly colourised and converted to 3D, with a soundtrack of banter, forced marches and artillery created in post-production. The staggering result is an immersive experience in the truest sense. View oEmbed on the source website It's narrated in a collage of commentary by unnamed soldiers (each one formally credited in the end credits with regiment and rank), their voices crackling with age and their spirit undimmed. The pre-war build-up is one of patriotic duty and the sense of a national outing for young men: one volunteer compares the training and anticipation to a “holiday camp”. A string of then-underage lads cheerfully describe the dodgy methods by which they circumvented the 18-and-over requirement (one, aged 17, is sent away by a recruiting sergeant and advised to “have a birthday and come back”). Jackson is best known for visualising verdant fantasy (Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit), but here he rises to the occasion of cold, hard reality. He makes sound documentarian decisions such as presenting the opening sections in Blighty in a square frame in misty black and white, with the constant whirr of a projector, as if showing home movies. Then he dramatically drops us across the Channel and into the quagmires of France and Belgium, with the reality of mechanised trench warfare revealed in widescreen and living colour. You quickly get over the shock of seeing once-grainy monochrome newsreel tinted and rendered corporeal with the added sound of rumbling ordnance, jolly chit-chat among comrades in arms and even, during one serene interlude, the subtle clink of beer bottles during a singalong. To use the technical term for added sound effects, this is Foley of the highest order. Slates dislodged from the roof of a farm building by the thunderous retort of a howitzer are the perfect instance of a little sound effect going a long way to bringing a sequence alive. The description from the soldiers is humorously colloquial at first, with talk of the “mad minute” of ten rounds being fired off in training and watered-down mess beer nicknamed “one pint and nine piddles”. But the gallows humour switches off permanently when battle comes down, and testimony is suddenly about noses “filled with fumes and death”, and a dead comrade’s perfectly bisected body providing “an excellent anatomy lesson.” The big push towards the end of a war that claimed 9.5 million military and civilian dead among the Allied Powers and 8 million among the Central Powers proves harder to illustrate, with less available moving footage, but Jackson fills in the gap by augmenting scant newsreel and gut-wrenching commentary with elegantly idealised sketch illustrations from the time. The sourest note to all this needless, empire-building carnage is sounded in the postscript, after what’s described as an Armistice without celebration among the ranks. When returning to the land of hope and glory they had left four years previously, these damaged “Britishers” were met with a wall of indifference from a country now preoccupied with mass unemployment. The civilian population was ill-equipped to talk about what the servicemen had witnessed and endured, and, in general, the effects off war were underestimated. Jackson and his team of technical, restorative historians have created a memorial that resonates like perhaps no other documentary on the subject – with specific honours offered in the final captions to Jackson’s serving English grandfather. The volunteers and conscripts who, at the start of the war believed that it would be all over by Christmas 1914 ended it mentally and physically scarred, hoping that it was the war “to end all wars”. With this account of events, Jackson ensures that their voices will inspire conversations about war and peace for generations. They Shall Not Grow Old will be on BBC2 at 9:30pm on 11 November and back in cinemas later in the month.
Private Life – Netflix movie review: "a warmly melancholic, empathic film"
Paul Giamatti and Kathryn Hahn play a bohemian couple desperate to have a baby in this well-observed comedy drama
★★★★ Writer/director Tamara Jenkins made her name with Slums of Beverly Hills and The Savages, both caustic comedies about families. For her latest slice of life she turns her observant attentions to a childless bohemian couple in Brooklyn, played with warm-blooded humanity and instantly credible chemistry by Paul Giamatti and Kathryn Hahn. New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day Top Netflix TV series Top 50 Netflix movies More Netflix news and recommendations <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2017/12/TheCrown_210_Unit_00197_R-a6b2b25.jpg" width="6000" height="4000" alt="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" title="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" /> With Hahn having put off getting pregnant to prioritise writing a feminist book, the couple fears they have missed their window when the latest round of IVF fails. Easy gags are avoided but smiles are still raised during the medical stages (such as Giamatti, in hospital gown, attempting to provide a sperm sample to a naff porn movie and getting the TV stuck on full volume), but the crux of the story is their decision to use a donor egg provided by Giamatti's super-intelligent step-niece (Kayli Carter). Droll dialogue ("We’re doing everything we can, short of kidnapping, to start a family") serves the narrative and while Jenkins gently mocks the middle-class suburban life of the couple’s in-laws (an industrial-strength leaf-blower is a particularly piquant symbol), Private Life is essentially a warmly melancholic, empathic film that holds your hand when it's most needed. Private Life is available to watch on Netflix View oEmbed on the source website
The Kissing Booth – Netflix movie review: "slapstick, social embarrassment and a secret affair"
Joey King betrays her BFF when her lifelong crush on his hunky brother develops into something a lot more
★★★ This Netfllix original film successfully landed in the laps of its sassy-but-anxious teen demographic and became a poster film for the brave new world of direct delivery. Based on a self-published novel by Welsh teenager Beth Reekles, it's a traditional tale of platonic LA high-school besties Lee (Joel Courtney) and Elle (Joey King), whose lifelong pact is threatened by her growing crush on his toned older brother (Jacob Elordi). New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day Top Netflix TV series Top 50 Netflix movies More Netflix news and recommendations <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2017/12/TheCrown_210_Unit_00197_R-a6b2b25.jpg" width="6000" height="4000" alt="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" title="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" /> Seasoned TV-movie director Vince Marcello has slapstick and social embarrassment down pat (Elle’s first-day-of-term skirt malfunction causes a bit of a stir) and the secret affair – shockingly consummated under the Hollywood sign – brews genuine angst and regret. A smattering of swearing, sexual references and underage drinking means it doesn't patronise its intended audience, and it refreshingly allows the female lead to be the dork, rather than some unobtainable Venus. Ironically, the school-carnival kissing booth itself is the only creaky device. The Kissing Booth is available to watch on Netflix View oEmbed on the source website
The Angel – Netflix movie review: "a brief history lesson that’s stranger than fiction"
Marwan Kenzari plays the real-life Egyptian double agent who passed secrets to Mossad
★★★★ Based on Uri Bar-Joseph’s biography of Ashraf Marwan, The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel, this is a reasonably faithful account of the double-agent son-in-law of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who helped avert a deadly escalation of the Yom Kippur War by passing secrets to Mossad. Directed by Israeli Ariel Vromen (whose American-set thrillers include The Iceman and Criminal), it builds commendable tension as clubbable but shifty family man Marwan (Dutch actor Marwan Kenzari) insinuates himself into the inner circle of Egyptian politics, gaining the trust of Anwar Sadat (Sasson Gabay) when he replaces Nasser in 1970. New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day Top Netflix TV series Top 50 Netflix movies More Netflix news and recommendations <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2017/12/TheCrown_210_Unit_00197_R-a6b2b25.jpg" width="6000" height="4000" alt="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" title="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" /> The action is essentially built around meetings and phone calls – in offices, bars and, in one fateful instance, a car park – but The Angel moves into more conventional political thriller territory when terrorists target a passenger jet and as the countdown to invasion begins. It’s intricately plotted, seriously acted (Yorkshireman Toby Kebbell is convincing as Marwan’s Israeli handler) and serves as a brief history lesson that’s stranger than fiction. The Angel is showing on Netflix View oEmbed on the source website
Hold the Dark – Netflix movie review: "tense human interaction and corporeal violence"
There's more conflict in rural America in this thriller from Green Room director Jeremy Saulnier
★★★ Virginian indie talent Jeremy Saulnier’s grisly thrillers (Blue Ruin, Green Room) grow in scale and budget, but lose none of their darkness. And that's literally the case for his fourth feature as director (and first for Netflix), which is set in Alaska during the winter months. The lack of light suits Saulnier and actor/screenwriter Macon Blair, and is all the better to cloak what’s actually happening. Jeffrey Wright is the retired naturalist called in by Riley Keough’s army wife to a remote, snowbound village after her six-year-old is taken by wolves. New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day Top Netflix TV series Top 50 Netflix movies More Netflix news and recommendations <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2017/12/TheCrown_210_Unit_00197_R-a6b2b25.jpg" width="6000" height="4000" alt="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" title="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" /> While the laconic expert tracks the wolfpack, hair-trigger hubby Alexander Skarsgard returns from Iraq and a parallel hunt ensues. Despite the best efforts of decent police chief James Badge Dale, Wright finds himself at the centre of age-old internecine grudges between the villagers and law enforcement. Saulnier excels at tense human interaction and corporeal, often crossbow-inflicted violence, and stages a mind-blowing, extended set piece that provides a premature climax. In its aftermath, a ritualistic demonic element never quite gels. The director has made conflict in rural American outposts his own, but needs to perhaps turn on the lights at some point. Hold the Dark is now showing on Netflix View oEmbed on the source website
The Land of Steady Habits – Netflix movie review: "a well-observed satire of middle-class ennui"
Ben Mendelsohn plays a man adrift, in this "small, sad story" from writer/director Nicole Holofcener
★★★ New York writer/director Nicole Holofcener has built an impressively focused body of work since her 1996 debut, Walking and Talking, getting sardonically under the skin of contemporary women as they deal with sex, relationships, age and family. Her sixth film (and first for Netflix), is, uniquely for her, an adaptation of a novel (by Ted Thompson) and concerns a man. Recently divorced, prematurely retired financier Anders Harris (played with soft, hapless appeal by Ben Mendelsohn) is adrift in a new build in a well-to-do Connecticut suburb, where mechanical sexual liaisons and social events he’s not really invited to emphasise the stability he’s left behind – specifically, practical ex-wife Helene (Edie Falco, minus the sharp edges of Carmela Soprano). New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day Top Netflix TV series Top 50 Netflix movies More Netflix news and recommendations <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2017/12/TheCrown_210_Unit_00197_R-a6b2b25.jpg" width="6000" height="4000" alt="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" title="The Crown - Matt Smith, Peter Morgan, Claire Foy - Writer/Creator Peter Morgan with Matt Smith (Prince Philip) and Claire Foy (Queen Elizabeth II)" /> What is essentially a well-observed satire of middle-class ennui is lent narrative weight by the fates of two young addicts: Anders and Helene’s recovering-alcoholic son Preston (Thomas Mann); and Charlie (Charlie Tahan), son of Helene’s self-medicating best friend (Elizabeth Marvel). And it's the bored Anders who intervenes, with unexpected results. Holofcener is right to call it "a sad, small story," as beyond the warm performances the constant thrum of moneyed self-indulgence occasionally palls, with the symbolically unwanted pet turtle being passed around perhaps one metaphor too many. The Land of Steady Habits is on Netflix View oEmbed on the source website
Glenn Close: I've got no regrets – except for the 'bunny boiler' scene in Fatal Attraction
"They made her into a psychopath," the six-time Oscar nominee says of her character Alex Forrest
I’m playing a parlour game with Glenn Close. We were discussing acting technique and I asked if she had a secret for making herself cry. She revealed that while shooting the 2016 British zombie-apocalypse horror The Girl with All the Gifts, she challenged co-star Gemma Arterton to a crying contest, “to see who could cry the most, the fastest. Gemma won.” At which juncture, she introduced me to another acting game: “One of you thinks of a colour. Then you put an expression on your face, which is your idea of what that colour is. The other person has to guess the colour.” All right, I think, you’re the six-time Oscar nominee, three-time Tony and Emmy Award winner… “You go first.” She centres herself facially, muttering, “OK, let’s see,” then assumes a serenely meaningful expression, which she holds as if freeze-framed. View oEmbed on the source website Fatal Attraction is being turned into a TV series — but do we really need another outdated bunny boiler? New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day I gaze at her, nervously, then I make my guess. Blue? Without breaking the spell, she shakes her head. Yellow? Another shake. Now I feel bad, as it can’t be Glenn Close’s acting that’s at fault – it must be my own failure. I give in; she tells me it was white. Gamely, she pulls another face. This time I get it: black. Her guffaw resounds around the high-ceilinged Palladian meeting room at Somerset House in London. She gives me a third expression. Purple. Yes! Two out of three! I’d assumed she’d be an ice queen; in fact, she’s closer to a Play School presenter. Now 71, Close is Hollywood royalty – a theatrical dame in all but crusty honorific, and an Oscar winner in all but the detail of having had her name chiselled into the plinth of an actual statuette. (Her six nominations without a win is the most of any living actress.) Born and raised in rural Connecticut, Close grew up communally after her parents joined Moral Re-Armament, a multifaith crusade that, with the benefit of hindsight, many now regard as a cult. A peripatetic, dictatorial childhood (when her father, a doctor, worked in Congo, the family moved to MRA’s HQ in Switzerland) drove her to self-expression through drama in her 20s. She also studied anthropology, and found her feet in open-air theatre. It transpired that the movie camera loved Close as much in contemporary stories (The Big Chill, Jagged Edge, The Paper) as it did in middlebrow costume dramas (Albert Nobbs) and in Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet, giving her the leverage to take on curveballs like Mars Attacks!, 101 Dalmatians and, more recently, Guardians of the Galaxy. She also ennobled early box-set TV by appearing in The Shield and all 59 episodes of legal saga Damages, while maintaining a garlanded stage career, starring in Sunset Boulevard and A Streetcar Named Desire. View oEmbed on the source website Her latest film is The Wife, a Swedish-British-US co-production (in UK cinemas from Friday 28 September). Close plays Joan Castleman, the seemingly devoted spouse of Jonathan Pryce’s patriarchal literary giant Joe Castleman, as the couple’s fragile union is threatened at a Nobel Prize-giving in Stockholm. For fans of Close’s detailed facial expressions, it’s a masterclass, with all the work going on behind her impassive eyes as Joan wrestles with the “loyal wife” archetype. I ask if the subtlety of the characterisation is what drew the woman who’s played larger-than-life characters Cruella De Vil and Norma Desmond to the part. “Yes, I like the fact that she’s in the background. One of my favourite scenes is when they arrive for a reception at the hotel and he [Pryce] gives her his coat!” She squeals with glee. “There’s nothing more powerful in life than two eyes; the close-up makes the audience enter the film.” The Wife is almost a theatrical piece, with lots of pairs of people talking in rooms. Was that an appeal? “The fights were very organic. Last time I saw it with an audience, I found the scenes at the Nobel dinner excruciating – I felt this thing in my chest. It was extraordinary to act. I felt that it was only Jonathan and I in that room. I knew what he was thinking." Unlike Joan, I say, you don’t strike me as someone who fades into the background. “I love fading into the background,” she announces. She’s dressed all in black, as if to make the point. “I’m not an extrovert. Most actors aren’t. If you’re an introvert, it’s easier to perform in front of 1,500 people than two people.” Close draws no artistic distinction between working in different media. Having debuted on the silver screen in The World According to Garp, she then took on a TV movie, Something about Amelia, with Ted Danson. “It was a script about incest,” she recalls with mock horror. “My agent said, ‘It will ruin your movie career.’ ” It didn’t. Close claims she has no regrets. But as an activist for greater understanding of mental health issues (her sister has bipolar disorder), she has re-evaluated her own portrayal of the mentally ill Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction, the highest-grossing film of 1987, in which a woman scorned after a fling with a married man turns into the “bunny boiler” of legend. View oEmbed on the source website “That did nothing but feed into the stigma,” she says now. “They made her into a psychopath. But people who suffer abuse can end up abusers. More interesting now would be the story from her point of view.” Did you have reservations at the time? “I had a reservation about the bunny.” Talking of abuse, do you feel that Hollywood is going through a reckoning in the #MeToo era? “Yes, and I welcome it. I think of it as a cultural revolution.” When I mention that US comic Bill Maher has said that all men are now on notice, she responds with another shriek: “You don’t want all of us to get angry at the same time!” When a knock at the door signals our time is up, she shows a sense of humour as black as her choice of wardrobe: “Someone is coming with a straitjacket!” The Wife is in UK cinemas now
Lucky movie: the perfect swan song for cult star Harry Dean Stanton
The beloved character actor who died last year aged 91 is at his best in this captivating new film from director John Carroll Lynch
On 23 October 2016, in Los Angeles, the inaugural Harry Dean Stanton Award went to… Harry Dean Stanton. The event was staged by the Vidiots Foundation, a tiny non-profit organisation that grew out of a boutique video rental store in Santa Monica. At this good-natured “evening of conversation and music”, director David Lynch presented his friend of many years with the award struck in his name. Stanton ambled on in his trademark crumpled jacket and work trousers and commented off-mic that he was so old he didn’t recognise the statuette was based on the torso of a naked woman. In place of an acceptance speech, he quoted The Tempest: “Our revels now are ended. These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air.” Stanton died a year ago at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on 15 September, aged 91, hailed in all quarters and described in a warm obituary in the New York Times as “the character actor who became a star”. Autumn’s top 20 dramas – introduced by their writers and creators ‘Shameless opened up all kinds of scabs in my family’: Paul Abbott on writing from life and his latest show No Offence View oEmbed on the source website It’s fitting that Stanton’s penultimate role, the first to be released posthumously, is a starring one. He plays the title character in Lucky (in cinemas and on demand from Friday 14th September), which marks the directorial debut of another reliable character actor, John Carroll Lynch. It’s a modest study of advancing age that combines comfortable routine in a one-horse Arizona town with existential doubt. The character of Lucky has much in common with Stanton himself: unmarried with no kids, both served as cooks in the US Navy during the Second World War (a faded photograph of Lucky in uniform is prominent in his shotgun shack). The two men also share an easy musicality that emerges when Lucky breaks into a captivating rendition of the tango Volver at a child’s birthday party. This took me back to my first glimpse of the actor, then aged 41, in the cast of 1967’s Cool Hand Luke, his prison inmate Tramp strumming gospel tunes like Just a Closer Walk with Thee and Ain’t No Grave (“gonna hold my body down”), while Paul Newman’s Luke digs a hole as punishment. As the trailer-park manager in the recent revival of Twin Peaks, he sang again – the campfire reel Red River Valley. Blowing the same tune on harmonica in Lucky, he gave a sense that he exists beyond the margins of the film he’s in. He once answered the question, “When do you do your best work?” with the answer, “After we wrap, on the way home.” View oEmbed on the source website Born in West Irvine, Kentucky, he was trained at the community founded Pasadena Playhouse in California, and acted as best man at roommate Jack Nicholson’s wedding to Sandra Knight in 1962. Throughout the 50s, 60s and 70s, he kept popping up, absorbing the craft under directors like Norman Jewison, Sam Peckinpah, Arthur Penn, Francis Coppola, John Huston and John Carpenter. Known by some as Harry “Zen” Stanton for his fatalistic philosophical outlook and belief in predestiny, our man always carried a world weariness that became grainier with the years. Even as the dad in the teen confection Pretty in Pink, the sage advice he gives Jon Cryer feels Stantonian: “You can’t make it happen. Either it will, or it won’t.” He existed under the radar for years, unnoticed except by a few critics. In 1978, New York Times writer Vincent Canby noted his “mysterious gift… to be able to make everything he does seems immediately authentic”. He was in his 50s when he landed his first starring roles, as a mentor in cult satire Repo Man and an amnesiac father in international arthouse winner Paris, Texas, both released in 1984. But he always seemed more comfortable out of the spotlight, providing back-up. In demand by chat-show bookers, he was often rendered mute by the camera. No wonder the wordless Travis, walking the desert in Paris, Texas, became his brand image. Sign up for the free RadioTimes.com newsletter If you want to understand the allure of his voice, seek out that film’s 11-and-a-half minute telephone monologue to his wife, played by Nastassja Kinski. “It’s kinda long,” he warns. “I knew these people, these two people, they were in love with each other…” You won’t be able to tear yourself away. Lucky is a beautifully fitting swan song for a man who seemed to embrace the lines and spare skin of old age. Lucky’s solitary morning ritual is mesmerising: to mariachi music on the radio, he lights the day’s first cigarette, flannel washes at the sink and gracefully combs his luxuriant hair over his ears. Then he enjoys a round of yoga in his baggy underwear and coffee from a pot whose LCD clock flashes permanently at 12:00. Dressed in jeans, plaid shirt, cowboy boots and battered cowboy hat, Lucky heads into town to fill in the day’s crossword at his usual counter seat in the diner and to wonder aloud what a seven-letter word for “augur” might be. The proprietor responds, “Portend”. And with that exchange, we shall tip our hat one last time to the character actor who was always a star and salute him with a line from The Tempest: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” Lucky is is cinemas from Friday 14th September
Yardie's Aml Ameen: 'I had to leave The Bill to get my career back on track'
The star of Idris Elba's directorial debut Yardie talks breaking America, quitting The Bill – and why Idris should play James Bond
When I meet sizzling British star Aml Ameen in London in August, the temperature outside is 31°C. In Santa Monica, where he has lived for the past eight years, it’s a balmy 27°. In Kingston, Jamaica, where his new film Yardie was partially shot, it’s 35°. The preternaturally affable Ameen, a youthful looking 33-year-old, hit something of a career impasse when he was 25, all too common among black British actors hoping to make a living in the UK. “I took my agent aside,” he tells me, “and I said to her, ‘Listen, I’m going round and round in circles, playing the same kind of characters. I need to leave.’ She said, ‘Darling, you can’t go out to America without heat.’” In other words, without a buzz, which he didn’t yet quite have. But Ameen pressed the issue and she let him piggyback a work trip to LA with another of her clients, Nicholas Hoult, the Skins graduate then on the cusp of a Stateside crossover. Hoult landed X-Men: First Class, but the trip was to change Ameen’s life, too. Idris Elba to return for four more episodes of Luther Yardie review: "Idris Elba's directorial debut feels richly authentic" First look at the return of Luther in eerie new trailer View oEmbed on the source website Yardie, a gritty bullet opera set in mid-1970s Jamaica and 1980s London, gives Ameen his first starring film role since he debuted in Kidulthood in 2006, which disappointingly led only to a loop of guest roles in series like Silent Witness. His trajectory through The Bill was more promising: he graduated from playing a victim in 2002 to a criminal in 2004, then PC Lewis Hardy, a regular until 2007. Now he’s back on the wrong side of the law in Yardie, and the film, in cinemas from 31st August, still feels like a career corrective, even if it meant changing continents to achieve it. His character, “D”, a pistol-packing drug mule and aspiring reggae MC, is sent from Kingston to London to deliver a kilo of cocaine, reuniting him with Yvonne (newcomer Shantol Jackson), mother of the daughter he’s never met. A revenge saga that throbs with an authentic dub reggae beat, Yardie also happens to be the directorial feature debut of Idris Elba, a towering role model for aspiring British actors of colour, who wedged the door open when he made it in the States. Ameen was born in London in 1985. His mum, a therapist (“the reason I’m analytical”), was born in Hendon to Jamaican parents, while dad, a self-employed immigration consultant and club owner, hails from St Vincent and the Grenadines. They divorced when Ameen was 16. He has vivid memories of visiting the Caribbean aged three and four, and “running around the veranda with my four-year-old cousin. We bumped heads – smack! – my head split open, nothing happened to him! This shows you how much tougher the Caribbean kids are.” Showing me his scar, he blames the bang on the head for his crazy decision to go into acting, aged six, when he enrolled at the private Barbara Speake Stage School in west London. After Barbara Speake, which he describes as “an insulated world, very well spoken”, he boldly opted for two years of “normal school” at Barnet College. “I learned to sag my pants a little bit, got a bit of swagger. It really informed me as an actor.” He credits this period for landing him the pivotal part in Kidulthood, playing the tragic Trife, and remembers telling other cast members, “I’m going to America, man!” When he finally made the move three years later, he met all the West Coast reps. They all raved about his showreel but said no – except for one, who’s still his manager in the States to this day. After reading for a part in an ABC show, he landed a main role as paralegal Malcolm Davies in Ally McBeal creator David E Kelley’s next legal drama Harry’s Law. “That changed my whole life. I’ll always remember it – it doesn’t feel exciting, or thrilling, it feels like peace.” Lodging with expat English actress Frances Fisher from Titanic, he completed both series of Harry’s Law, making a friend for life in its star, Kathy Bates (“Mate, she’s like my mum in America!”), and winning roles in The Butler, The Maze Runner and Netflix’s Sense8. Many actors may claim to be aspiring writers and directors, but Ameen is the real deal, with a handful of shorts and a low-budget feature, The Pick Up, on his CV. As we take a selfie and prepare to re-enter the heatwave, Ameen tells me he’s developing a Christmas-themed British romantic comedy that “feels like Love Actually but with some people that look like me”. He laughs at his own cheek. Reluctant to get drawn into issues like the “black flight” still draining the British film industry’s talent pool and America’s advantage when it comes to colour-blind casting, he diplomatically concludes, “There’s hope to be had.” And, yes, he thinks Elba should be the next Bond: “The country loves him – he was at the Royal Wedding, for God’s sake!” Yardie is in UK cinemas now
Yardie review: “Idris Elba’s directorial debut feels richly authentic”
The actor adapts Victor Headley’s novel into a sure-fire hit that investigates ethnic and identity-based struggle
★★★★ Like many schoolboys of my generation, I remember passing around paperback copies of the pseudonymous Richard Allen’s 70s pulp novels about predominantly white British youth tribes (Skinhead, Boot Boys, Glam). Had I been younger in the early 90s I might have caught the similar cultural fire ignited by their unofficial Jamaican successor, Yardie by Victor Headley. His debut novel was a self-starting sensation on publication through a small press in 1992, a snapshot of the Caribbean diaspora in London built around guns, drugs and internecine violence, and told in unvarnished, phonetic patois that took some getting used to. Selling tens of thousands of copies but not necessarily through bookshops (it was as likely to change hands in clothing stores or Afro-Caribbean outlets, and broadsheet reviews were almost non-existent), its portrayal of street life in Brixton in southwest London was raw and specific. View oEmbed on the source website The location shifts north to Hackney for its belated film adaptation, as that’s where debuting writer-director Idris Elba grew up, and it’s he who had the pulling power to finally get Yardie to the screen. His stock as an actor and personality has never been higher, and he strikes at a time of deeper understanding for roots and identity. He’s also the one who – one gathers from the muscular marketing push – was able to get the film into the multiplexes and beyond its target audience of colour. But it’s a big ask when your protagonist is a vengeful drug dealer from Jamaica who arrives at Heathrow with a kilo of cocaine taped under his clothes (Yardie is Caribbean slang for criminal). Played with charisma to spare by North London-born Aml Ameen (The Maze Runner, Sense8), “D” is a Jamaican 20-year-old still haunted by the death of his non-violent older brother Jerry (Everaldo Creary, one of many naturalistic Jamaican actors in the cast). “D”, which is short for Dennis, is deliberately softened from the page by writers Martin Stellman (whose debut was Quadrophenia) and Brock Norman Brock (Bronson), but the threat of violence within a divided diaspora is never far away. No more apologetic is the patois, which – in common with HBO’s The Wire, the gritty drama series that made Elba’s name – requires non-Caribbean audiences to tune in and catch the vibe. Stephen Graham (whose father is half-Jamaican) brings fire and fury to gangster Rico – he slips in and out of patois like a radio constantly retuning. Meanwhile another Jamaican, Shantol Jackson, adds depth to the mother of D’s child, long ago settled in London and halfway between saintly conscience and potential salvation. It’s a man’s world in the early 80s, but again, the mistreatment of women seems to have been adjusted for this century. In my teenage years, I saw two key British films at a local film society that were set in London, the BFI’s Pressure (1976) by Horace Ové, a Trinidadian story filmed in Ladbroke Grove, and Babylon (1980) by Franco Rosso, which starred a young Brinsley Forde, future star of the group Aswad, and was co-written by Quadrophenia scribe Stellman. For a provincial youth like me, both films had educational value, especially at a time of the Brixton riots, which seemed far away. We are more cosmopolitan now, perhaps, and more attuned to ethnicity and diversity. And so, with Yardie, the time seems ripe for the packaging of what remains a genuine cult novel into a mainstream property. It has belatedly found its moment as a passion project and directorial feature debut for Elba, who cannily foregrounds the more unifying, bass-heavy reggae of sound systems and dub soundclashes, whose “toasting” recalls the rap battles in Eminem’s 8 Mile. The establishing early-70s backstory, shot in Kingston and Trench Town in an initially almost paradisaically verdant Jamaica, feels richly authentic. And amid all the signifiers and allusions that resonate with the ethnic and identity-based struggles of today, Elba’s mission to demystify the culture feels even more sincere. Yardie opens in cinemas on Friday 31 August.
Meet Endeavour writer Russell Lewis: a real man of mystery
Detective Endeavour Morse has secrets – but not nearly as many as the man who writes him
I am due to be met off the train at Oxford by Russell Lewis, the man who devised ITV’s Inspector Morse prequel Endeavour and who has single-handedly written every one of the 17 two-hour episodes since its 2012 launch, plus six in the new, fifth series. Lewis mischievously uses an image of Patrick Magee in A Clockwork Orange as his Twitter avatar, so in order to identify him at the station, I searched for him on Google Images. There are no photos of him in the public domain, except the screen-grab I finally track down on a site called Movie Dude where, unhelpfully, he’s playing a character who’s seven years old. Thankfully, he recognises me and sidles up on the concourse using a greeting familiar to fans of From Russia with Love: “Excuse me, can I borrow a match?” I expected a tweedy Oxford-don type with leather elbow patches, but Lewis looks more like a hill-walking A&R man, a gravel-voiced 54-year-old in a North Face waterproof with the hairstyle of a young Ted Bovis. Meet the cast of Endeavour series five Endeavour fans think Shaun Evans is becoming more like John Thaw’s Morse in series five Endeavour will return for a sixth series, but some cast members won’t be back He leads me to the famous, neo-gothic Randolph Hotel and a pint of “Oxford Blue” in the Morse Bar. Actually, we have coffee, observed by framed photos of detective inspectors Lewis and Hathaway, Inspector Morse creator Colin Dexter (who died last March just as filming on Endeavour’s fifth series began) and Morse himself in a hospital bed in a 1998 episode. The non-fictional Lewis and I will spend the next two days on Endeavour’s set being queried or moved on by actual security guards as – to an extent by his own design – very few people on the crew know that this is the chap who writes it. Lewis speaks in the clipped aphorisms he gives to Roger Allam’s character, DI Thursday, as if he too came of age during the war (“Got to play the ball where it lies… Revenge is a dish best served cold”). He’s garrulous, generous company and a happily married non-drinking father of one who seems to run on coffee and cigarettes. We settle down in the Randolph’s private lounge to discuss how he got where he is today, and he reveals it’s his first weekend off in seven months. For Lewis, Endeavour is less a detective show, more a way of life, at least for two-thirds of a year. They have tried out other writers, as per Morse and Lewis, but it didn’t work “because we’d already set up an idiosyncratic template, and I have real trouble overwriting other people,” explains Lewis, by which he means re-writing. “We’re doing volume in British TV drama now [this series comprises six films, instead of four], which follows the American model. I’ve overwritten in the past, but nine times out of ten you’re not doing a polish, you’re going back to basics, squaring a circle not of your own devising.” Lewis works seven days a week during production and sometimes writes for 48 hours straight “without seeing the pillow. But the mail must get through! When you’ve been on a real one- or two-nighter, you read it back and you can’t remember having written it. And often, that’s some of the best stuff, because you’re so fried, the barriers come down.” I mention these sessions to Endeavour himself, Shaun Evans, who remarks, paternally, “I think he should look after himself a bit better.” Lewis was born in 1963 in Battersea, south London, raised and formally adopted by his maternal grandmother and her second husband, who provided his surname. He speaks of “a certain lived experience of dark secrets and unhappy families that has stood me in good stead when it comes to Endeavour”. Protective of “the sensitivities of all concerned who are still alive”, he describes his background as “potentially still a bit of an emotional minefield”. He attended “an academically wonky stage school” between age four and 16, which is why there’s a photo of him on an obscure website: he landed a part in the 1972 period biopic Young Winston, directed by Richard Attenborough, playing the even younger Winston. “Dickie was very sweet, [co-star] Anne Bancroft was lovely. Robert Shaw was my dad – there’s a title for the autobiography!” He was too young to see the other stuff he was in (Sunday Bloody Sunday; I, Claudius) and gave acting up in his 20s to play in rock bands, living off the dole once he’d burned through the money in his child-star trust fund (“Fender Rhodes don’t come cheap”). He and some fellow drama-school grads moved into fringe theatre and some good reviews meant an agent could get him “through the door” at The Bill, where he wrote “22-minute playlets”. This led to script commissions for Taggart, Between the Lines, Sharpe, Cadfael then Inspector Morse, in 1995. Why does he work so hard to maintain his anonymity? “It enables one to slip through the cracks,” he reasons. “Infinitely harder to observe if one is being observed. Moscow Rules.” That’s a Cold War reference. With Lewis, you’re never far away from a footnote or an elliptical cultural nod. For me, these are what make Endeavour such a head-spinning joy. It was during the third series, an episode called Prey, where a night-time scene of Oxford hippies drinking, toking and strumming acoustic guitars around a campfire in the woods gave me a Jaws flashback, confirmed when pathologist Max DeBryn notes “portions of denuded bone remaining” on a severed arm, a direct quote from the shark film. That same series playfully referenced Night of the Demon, The Great Gatsby, Dog Day Afternoon and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. I call this metatextuality; Lewis prefers “grace notes and finials”, tracing them back to the “mischievous quotations and chapter headings” in Dexter’s novels. You’ll remember, too, that composer Barrington Pheloung used the dots and dashes of Morse code in his theme tune. “It’s there if you want it,” Lewis says. “But we won’t be docking any points if you don’t.” It’s Day 13 on “Film 6”, and the first scenes I witness involve DI Thursday, looking in the window of a jeweller’s on Turl Street. Although rubbernecking tourists throng the location shoots from behind lines policed by location marshals, true fans with long lenses abide by an unspoken pact not to publish spoilers. Unlike the low-profile Lewis, 37-year-old Shaun Evans is instantly recognisable with his strawberry blond hair, hypnotic blue eyes, slight frame and freckles. I first notice him in a stylish Kangol cap hovering behind director Gordon Anderson as the same shot is set, shot, re-set and shot again, so I say hello. He’s not required for the rest of the day as an actor, but he’s here in his new role of associate producer. “I like to make the most of the opportunity,” he tells me in his soft Liverpudlian twang. “Part of the joy of the show is having so many top-end directors. There’s a lot to be gained from them.” Lewis confirms that Evans is a “team man, and plays a very straight bat. He doesn’t care for flannel.” It’s admirable for an actor of his stature and popularity to come with zero airs and graces – when he calls you “my friend,” it doesn’t feel false. (He’s also recently expanded his portfolio into directing, helming his first episode of Casualty last year during Endeavour downtime, and his second and third at the start of this year for a late-summer transmission.) Somewhat self-consciously, I later find myself invited to the cast-and-crew wrap party in a lounge at the Holiday Inn, thrown the night before the final day of shooting, as the crew tend to disperse as soon as the final “Cut!” is yelled. The morning after, on a sun-dappled shoot in the grounds of Christ Church, there are bleary-eyed rumours that last night’s free bar bill tipped £3,000. If so, it was worth every penny after another even more demanding endeavour. “It’s great to have the opportunity to hang out, have a few drinks, let your hair down and have a dance,” says Evans. “It’s a good way of letting everyone know how much they’re appreciated.” Meanwhile, Russell Lewis is trying to convince a car park attendant that he’s allowed to park there as he’s the chap who writes Endeavour. View oEmbed on the source website Endeavour series five airs on PBS Masterpiece on Sundays, 9/8c
What We Started review: "a decent, comprehensive account of dance music's evolution"
Carl Cox, Martin Garrix and a who's who of dance-music doyens provide chapter and verse on the history of EDM
★★★ A documentary about dance music feels like a contradiction in terms; to analyse what is an intuitive, primal, physical activity risks robbing its essence. That said, the form’s history is as colourful and politically charged as the well-worn, hoary old saga of rock, and co-directors Bert Marcus and Cyrus Saidi give a decent, comprehensive and star-witness-studded account of its evolution, from sexually liberating New York disco to the more consumer-led EDM (electronic dance music) of today. View oEmbed on the source website Footage of 50-something Carl Cox working a crowd over a ten-hour all-nighter in Ibiza is contrasted with laptop-enabled Martin Garrix, the Dutch bedroom whizz who was catapulted to the world stage while still in his teens. What We Started pays respect to pioneers Paul Oakenfold, Louie Vega and Pete Tong, and teases old-school opprobrium from them as they accuse today’s “superstar DJs” of lacking their hard-won turntable skills in a USB-stick age. Does the technology matter? The jury’s out in what is a two-sided account. But the grandads certainly have better war stories to tell. Available on Netflix now